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Saturday, February 18, 2012

The start to a 'real foods' life

I have really been giving this real foods some thought this week (as I totally did nothing but munch on pizza and pop and cake and junk). I think we are going to go for it! I want to do it in steps though so not to shock the family or the checkbook. At the real foods class that I attended last week at church, I received a pie graph of sorts on areas to change up to have a real foods life.

One was filtered water. We do this and have been doing this for a few years now. The one thing we did not do is use the filtered water to make things with, as in drinks. I think I am going to start doing that, or at least try to. For cooking and baking and such, I am okay with using tap as I feel everything will be cooked out, ya know, all the bad stuff. For making drinks, I am going to start using the filtered water.

The next step is to switch out our sweeteners. We already have local honey in the cupboard and we have organic syrup (although I am going to need to order some more). I also have some dehydrated cane juice (aka sucanot, or rapadura) on hand. I still have some white sugar, but will use that for the kombucha and kefir. Oh and I did buy some liquid stevia today to use. Shoot! I forgot to buy some molasses! That's okay, I dont think I will need it anytime soon.

As far as meats go: we will only buy 'wild caught' fish, as opposed to 'farm raised' fish. Wild caught fish are loaded with omega 3s while farm raised tend to be higher in omega 6s (which can be linked to inflammatory responses). This is what I have learned. You dont know if the farm raised ones were all cramped in an area or not. With wild caught, these fish have the ocean at their fins and know all about keeping personal space, ya know for reasons such as pooping and all. These farm raised have no control of their personal space and can be swimming all around in other's yuckiness and who wants fish that basically could be swimming in filth? Not me...so wild caught it is for us. Also, we are going to stay away from nitrate and nitrites as much as we can. I think this is more for things like hotdogs (which have too much sodium for the boy so we dont consume) and bacon, and lunch meats. We learned about some great deals at BJs for the bacon!

Veggies/fruits: Trying to slowly ease into organics when able. So far we are going to do celery and apples as we consume lots of them and those should be bought organically anyways.

Dairy: We have not really touched on this subject yet

Oils: We are going to be using only butter (unsalted), olive oil (extra virgin for fresh things and regular ol olive oil for cooking), and coconut oil.

Breads: This is something that is in the works for us.

I think we are slowly getting there! Oh and we have already drastically reduced the amount of processed foods since the boy's kidney disease diagnosis so we really were on the way to a real foods diet!